Paul Motwani

Who is Paul Motwani?

Paul Motwani is of Scottish/Indian descent and was Scotland's first chess Grandmaster. Born in Glasgow but growing up in Dundee, he became World Cadet Champion in 1978, and won the first of his seven Scottish Championship titles that year. He was a secondary school mathematics teacher at St Saviour's RC High School in Dundee for a number of years after studying mathematics and physics at the University of Dundee. In 1990, he took time out to pursue his final Grandmaster norm.

He has been a regular member of the Scottish Olympiad team for the last 18 years, never having had a performance rating below 2500. He made his first two Grandmaster norms at the 1980 and 1988 Olympiads, then faced a race against time to achieve his third before the first one expired in 1991. He just failed to reach the required number of points in a hastily-organised tournament in Dundee days before the deadline, ironically, FIDE changed the rules shortly after this, and reset the expiry time for norms at six years. He duly achieved his final norm in 1992, and starred in a Grampian Television documentary called "The Grandmasters of Dundee" along with Colin McNab, who had also achieved the title by then.